Sep 01, 2026 World Animal Day: A Century of Speaking Up for Animals
Every October 4, people around the world come together to celebrate World Animal Day, recognizing the many ways animals enrich our lives and sustain the world we share. Whether providing companionship, supporting healthy ecosystems, or inspiring wonder and discovery, animals play a vital role in our communities and on our planet. Yet few people realize that this global observance has its roots in a remarkable international movement that began more than a century ago. Thanks to research by Dutch animal advocate and historian Wim DeKok, the story behind World Animal Day is coming back into focus, revealing how early animal protection leaders worked to create a day that would unite people everywhere on behalf of animals.
Recently, Wim DeKok, a Dutch animal advocate who founded many animal advocacy organizations and is an amateur historian of the movement, discovered an early attempt to establish October 4, the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, as World Animal Day. Watch Wim DeKok’s presentation on the origins of World Animal Day.
According to Wim, the international animal protection movement’s first meeting was held in Dresden in 1860, more than 160 years ago. International conferences continued to be held approximately every two years following the Dresden gathering. In 1929, the international meeting was held in Vienna and attracted 500 people from 35 countries. Reports of that meeting appeared in news media across the world.
One of the proposals emerging from the 1929 Vienna meeting was a recommendation to approach the League of Nations to request that it establish an Animal Protection Division and create a World Animal Day. The person who proposed the resolution to create World Animal Day was Heinrich Zimmermann, a German who headed the Friends of Cats Society, which had 40,000 members. Zimmermann also published a biweekly magazine, Mensch und Hund (Man and Dog), that ran from 1924 to 1936.
The first World Animal Day was organized by Heinrich Zimmermann at the Sport Palace in Berlin on March 24, 1925, and attracted more than 5,000 attendees. Zimmermann had originally intended the celebration to take place on October 4, the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, but venue constraints required the inaugural event to be held in March. In 1929, World Animal Day was first celebrated on October 4. Two years later, at an international animal protection conference in Florence, Italy, delegates unanimously endorsed a proposal formally recognizing October 4 as World Animal Day.
Although World Animal Day on October 4 is now celebrated in over a hundred countries, it is not yet widely observed in North America, a gap that Wim DeKok would like to rectify.
Today, the UK-based Naturewatch Foundation coordinates the global World Animal Day campaign, supporting events and a growing network of ambassadors worldwide. Its continuing commitment to elevating the status of animals and recognizing them as sentient beings carries forward the vision of the movement’s early leaders.
The growing call to recognize animals as sentient beings closely aligns with WellBeing International’s mission and long-standing commitment to advancing knowledge about animal well-being. Through the open-access Animal Sentience journal and the WellBeing International Studies Repository (WBISR), WBI helps make research and information on animal sentience and welfare freely available to readers around the world.
As public awareness of animal sentience continues to grow, so too does interest in understanding its implications for animal welfare, policy, and society. By supporting access to scientific knowledge and fostering dialogue on these issues, WBI seeks to help build a future in which animals are increasingly recognized as sentient beings whose well-being matters.